The big story to come out of the NPD Group's November recap of game industry retail sales in the US was record-setting sales of Nintendo's Wii and DS, which sold a combined 3.6 million units last month. However, yesterday also revealed heightened demand for console and handheld software. Thanks to a strong debut from Microsoft's Gears of War 2 and Activision's Call of Duty: World at War, sales in the category were up a combined 11 percent year over year.

As the NPD Group segments off its desktop software sales from its console and handheld report, that figure doesn't even factor in one of the biggest releases of the year, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. This week, NPD also revealed sales rankings for PC games in November, and unsurprisingly, Lich King and its collector's edition companion secured the first and second slot.

As noted by NPD analyst Anita Frazier yesterday, Wrath of the Lich King sold in excess of 1.4 million units during its debut month. That tally represents just one half of the game's first-day worldwide sales, which Activision Blizzard pegged at 2.8 million shortly after the WOW expansion's debut. At the end of October, Blizzard Entertainment announced that its massively popular massively multiplayer online game had breached the 11-million-subscriber mark.

World of Warcraft subscribers hail from a number of countries and regions, including North America, Europe, China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Most recently, WOW was launched in Russia and Latin America.